Every Dream Is A Discourse: Lacan, Jung, and The Linguistic Nature of Unconscious Dreamscapes

Every Dream Is a Discourse : M ANZI 73
Every Dream Is a

Discourse: Lacan, Jung,
and the Linguistic Nature
of Unconscious
Dreamscapes

GEOFFREY C. MANZI

“The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank
or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can
be rediscovered; usually, it has already been written down elsewhere.”1
—Jacques Lacan

I NTRODUCTION

Despite their status as major influences in the history of psychoanalysis,
exceedingly little academic scholarship within the discipline of psychology
focuses on bringing Jacques Lacan and Carl Gustav (C.G.) Jung into dialogue
G EOFFREY M ANZI is a doctoral student of philosophy in the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the
University of Dallas. His primary research interests include twentieth century continental
philosophy, the intersection of philosophy and psychology (esp. psychoanalysis), and the role of
narrative in personal identity formation.

1 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 38.

74 RAMIFY 5.1 (2015)

with one another, and casting a wider net over all areas of research yields no
greater catch. Perhaps one reason for such hesitation among scholars is the
prevailing notion that the psychologists’ respective approaches to the
mysteries of the unconscious are so fundamentally disparate that bridging the
gulf without the aid of interpretive concessions seems impossible. The
conclusion one may draw from this lack of exchange on two of psychology’s
most influential spearheads is that scholars—treating them as though they
were awkward guests at a dinner party—have deemed it better for the sake of
the soirée that the two remain muted mutual acquaintances—nay, veritable
strangers—rather than force shared conversation upon them. And yet, with a
little effort, some of life’s most engrossing discussions emerge in spite of
popular expectation; perhaps the time has come for a host to seat each thinker
across from the other at the dinner table, so to speak.
It is in the spirit of such cautious optimism that I propose a scholarly
toast to temerity in the form of a carefully drawn out comparison of two of
psychology’s most cryptic contemplatives and uncompromising critics. The
following comparison provides the reader with a salient account of each
psychologist’s notion of the unconscious, beginning with Lacan before moving
on to Jung. The purpose of these overviews is twofold: to provide a context
out of which each thinker’s approach to dream interpretation emerges and,
accordingly, to articulate the interpretive method by which each thinker
investigates dreams. For this reason, I have either omitted or downplayed
those facets of thought in either'ʹs psychoanalytic theory that do not directly
attend to dream interpretation. Ultimately, such a comparison yields insight
into the primacy of language—and specific manifestations thereof—in both
Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalytic dream interpretation, thereby situating
our otherwise psychoanalytic antipodes on common ground, itself an
indispensable condition for engendering rich and rewarding dialogue.2 Most
2 This article is part of a larger work, in which I continue the investigation introduced here by
venturing beyond the rarified air of the theoretical and into the realm of applied understanding
via the case study. Specifically, I recall in detail Jung’s analysis of the infamous Frank Miller
dream series, which is found in his Symbols of Transformation, followed by an endeavor to apply a
Lacanian-‐‑influenced hermeneutic approach to the same set of dreams. A comparison of these
respective interpretations—both Jung’s published findings and my own determination of what
Lacan’s conclusion’s might have been, given what I establish about his analytic method in this
article—arguably bears the fruit of the overall labor; in what follows, I establish the grounds for

importantly, it is my hope that the following comparison inspires the reader
toward attentive reflection upon the nature and significance of one’s own
dreams.

P ART I, S ECTION I
A S EMIOTICS OF S YMPTOMS : L ACAN ’S L INGUISTIC R EFORMULATION OF
P SYCHOANALYSIS

Perhaps the most noted aspect of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is its
foundational apothegm, namely, that the unconscious is structured like a
language.3 That such a provocative proposition monopolizes the attention
paid to Lacan’s work is appropriate, for, beyond grounding Lacan’s
interpretive method of dream analysis, this insight into the nature of the
unconscious impacts his theory on subjectivity, informs his understanding of
the psychological dimension of human lifespan development, and even
tempers his expectation for the rehabilitative capacity of psychoanalysis.
Indeed, this singular premise presides over all facets of Lacan’s thought, for it
is the orienting principle—of a particularly disorienting quality—that allows
one to recognize the precise way in which seemingly disparate elements of his
psychoanalytic theory cohere.
However, in order to begin to understand what Lacan might mean by
this rather mystifying statement—especially as it relates to our investigation of
dreams—one must first be aware of its place in the gradual unfurling of
psychoanalysis in general, that is, from psychoanalysis’ nascence as a science
intent on studying previously unconsidered psychic phenomena with the
overall aim of helping disturbed individuals, to what might be perceived as a
such a case study through a careful (and what I hope is compelling) comparison of Lacan and
Jung.
3 The first time this formula appears in print is in one of Lacan'ʹs seminars. There, it appears in
rudimentary form: “Translating Freud, we say—the unconscious is a language” (Lacan, Seminars,
11). Interestingly, Lacan himself expressed some concern over his somewhat tautological
formulation on at least one occasion: when speaking to a gathering of international scholars in
Baltimore during the autumn of 1966, he admits that the qualification, “as a language,” is wholly
redundant because it means exactly the same thing as “structured” (See Lacan, “Of Structure,”
188). For further elaboration and contextualization of this qualification, see also Nobus, “Lacan’s
science of the subject,” 58.

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multifarious academic enterprise—one that has forgotten its dialogical and
curative roots. Thus, it is in response to what Lacan views as a schism within
the psychoanalytic movement of the early 1950’s that he often characterizes
his own approach to psychoanalysis as a return to Freud.4 In doing so, Lacan
intends to suggest that his approach to psychoanalysis is a “return to the
meaning of Freud,” which is to say, a return to a particular kind of symbolic
order yielded by the unconscious, one that begs for interpretation in, by, and
through language.5 Not incidentally, Lacan’s contribution to Freudian
psychology in this regard is to suggest that, in order to do so truly (and
thereby remain authentically Freudian), one must first interpret the
unconscious as a language by virtue of fully recognizing its intrinsic linguistic
structure. To be sure, Lacan is not suggesting that an unconscious is located at
a specific spot within each one of us—as though it were an observable piece of
the brain or its own bodily organ—wherein it “speaks” its own particular
language similar to all other languages found throughout the world. Rather,
he means to claim that, collectively, those psychical symptoms of an
individual that manifest outside of the realm of one’s conscious intentions and
circumvent one’s conscious awareness reveal, or communicate, themselves in
such a fashion that indicates a kinship with the way in which language itself
operates, especially with regard to those governing features that afford
language its perceived organic quality and structural integrity. Furthermore,
Lacan argues for such an understanding of the unconscious by synthesizing
preexisting, albeit refined, Freudian tenets with linguistic elements, a
synthesis that he accomplishes through a novel appropriation of certain key
precepts found in structuralism. To present most clearly Lacan’s position
within the proper context of his most significant influences, I follow the
trajectory of Lacan’s development of Freud by beginning with the emergence
of the unconscious in childhood development prior to its articulation in dream
form, followed by Freud’s identification—and Lacan’s subsequent
deepening—of the operative elements organizing dreams, before finally
4 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis,”197–201. For a separate and,
arguably, more impassioned plea, please see Lacan, “Beyond the ‘Reality Principle,’” 58–74.
5 Ibid., My emphasis. Lacan employs this banner-‐‑statement in several different essays throughout
his corpus as a way to describe his overall objective. Perhaps most poignantly, Lacan
unequivocally proclaims the following at a public lecture that he delivered roughly one year prior
to his death: “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian” (See Jacques Lacan,
“Overture to the 1st International Encounter of the Freudian Field,” 18).

arriving at Lacan’s uncovering of the inherently linguistic nature of such
formative principles.
Prior to tracing the links in the chains of association that comprise the
unconscious, however, it is first necessary to differentiate it from another
element of the psyche with which it often gets conflated: the preconscious. To
be sure, the unconscious differs from the preconscious insofar as the “stuff” of
the preconscious is but incidentally outside of that of which the conscious
subject is presently aware and, as such, can be called to mind freely and
immediately.6 In other words, preconscious content escapes consciousness’
attention inadvertently, and such content thereby remains readily available for
consciousness to recall and is neither inhibited by acts of repression nor, when
called upon, appears incognito. By comparison, Lacan subscribes to the
Freudian theory that the origin of the unconscious occurs as a reaction to what
Freud refers to throughout his corpus as the Oedipus complex, which, for
Lacan, finds its “resolution” in the subsequent castration of the phallus by the
Father. As the theory suggests, unconscious content consists of traumatic
experiences and illicit desires that seem to evade conscious awareness
naturally through instinctive, automatic repression.7 As we shall see below,
when such content manifests in its nocturnal form of expression, the taboo
circumstances surrounding its birth necessitate a characteristic lack of
interpretive transparency to all of its oneiric representations. For Lacan, the
impetus behind such an intrapsychic reaction lies at the very heart of
childhood development, namely, socialization, to which I now turn.
Lacan understands childhood development as the formation of a
child’s sense of self, one that necessarily involves the mediation of initial
desires by intrusive external forces and crests in an introduction into societal
6 Sigmund Freud articulates this very distinction. See Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in
Psychoanalysis,” 314–315.
7 Repression, here, is not to be mistaken with suppression, which is a conscious agent’s deliberate
attempt at forgetting something that she finds deeply troubling. However, it is worth mentioning
that, even here, intentionality is latent in the defense mechanism of repression in spite of its knee-‐‑
jerk connotation. For that matter, intentionality plays a significant, sometimes-‐‑subtle role in a
variety of Freud’s theories, no doubt indicative of the influence of his teacher, Franz Brentano,
who also taught Edmund Husserl (and who, like Freud, takes seriously Brentano’s notion of
intentionality, albeit in a slightly different fashion). I kindly refer the reader to Freud and Joseph
Breur'ʹs Studies on Hysteria; therein, repression is always preceded by the term, intentional.

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norms. He first argues in an early and influential work that a budding child is
unable to identify himself clearly as a single, cohesive whole, one that is
individuated from all other entities.8 As Lacan understands it, a child first
experiences his body as fragmented insofar as he is unable to operate some
appendages as well as others. Such primary experiences lead the child to a
tentative and nebulous notion of himself, which, for Lacan, is only logical,
given the child’s unrefined motor skills and imprecise depth perception.9
Eventually, the child, upon peering at his reflection in a mirror and grasping
the reflected image as his own, arrives at the realization that his body is,
judging by its reflection, an integrated whole.10 Such recognition (literally, a
re-‐‑cognizing of his self-‐‑perception in light of this profound insight), mediated
by his external image, or “imago,” ushers in a heightening of self-‐‑awareness
and accompanying delight in spite of the fact that the child’s firsthand
experience of his interaction with objects in the world continues to remain
characteristically disjointed.11 That the child’s direct, albeit limited, experience
as “decentred,” or as an embodied yet uncoordinated creature, seems to betray
the cohesiveness of the imago staring back at him is crucial for Lacan’s
philosophical anthropology because it anticipates such future problematic
relationships of ipseity (selfhood) and alterity (otherness) as the conflation of
one’s inevitably fractured self with one’s “ideal I” and, more pertinent to the
8 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” 75–81.
9 Elsewhere, Lacan further concludes that young children have little understanding of where they
end and the rest of the world begins. For example, a child might reach for an object located far
across the room, yet, simply because it resides in his field of vision, the child believes it to be well
within his reach. Ultimately, Lacan takes such observations as empirical grounds for psychologist
Charlotte Buhler’s notion of transitivism, a term used to describe such phenomena as when a
child strikes another child, only to believe that it was he who was struck, or when a third child
cries out in pain upon witnessing that second child being struck by the first one, as though that
third child, who merely bore witness, were actually the assaulted party. See Lacan, “Aggressivity
in Psychoanalysis,” 13.
10 This is thought to occur, generally, sometime between the sixth and eighteenth month of life.
11 Because the catalyst for incipient self-‐‑individuation necessarily involves an external image, or
an-‐‑other, Lacan concludes that one’s sense of self is always mediated from without. As scholar
Matthew Sharpe writes in his encyclopedia entry on Lacan, “The implications of this observation
on the mirror stage, in Lacan’s reckoning, are far-‐‑reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it
holds, then the genesis of individuals’ sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from
the “organic” or “natural” development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them.
The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego
already mapped out in Freud’s Ego and Id).”

current discussion, the disjuncture between one’s dreams and waking life.12 Of
course, the text that sets the context, so to speak, for all future possibilities of a
child’s relation to itself and with others is the primordial relationship fostered
between the child and his primary caregiver, the maternal parent.
It is generally understood that, according to Freudian depth
psychology, the bonds forged between an infant and his mother during the
earliest stages of development are absolutely fundamental to any attempt at
self-‐‑understanding in the name of psychological rehabilitation. The child,
completely reliant upon his primary nurturer, comes to identify with his
source of attention and nourishment to the point where the child, quite
literally, cannot comprehend clearly where he ends and his mother begins.
Eventually, however, the child not only achieves the aforementioned
realization that he is his own entity but also begins to grasp that his mother is
also a separate entity, and this typically occurs when the child’s desire for
sustenance goes unfulfilled for a short time. This, in turn, prompts the child to
identify his mother as his object of affection, for she is that which, for the most
part, responds to his every beck and call, and those times when the mother
does not rush to meet the child’s needs indicates to the child that the mother is
tending to her own needs elsewhere. The child, now enamored with his
mother, wishes to reciprocate her love by being that which completely satisfies
her every desire; from such a perspective, the child imagines a scenario in
which he and his mother compose a self-‐‑contained, self-‐‑sustaining unity. Of
12 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” 2–4. Although outside the scope of the
current discussion, it is worth mentioning that said imago proceeds to function as a gestalt for
emerging perceptions of selfhood. Specifically, Lacan will argue that the seemingly cohesive
reflection peering back at the child suggests that it is possible to actually become fully integrated,
both internally as well as externally. However, the inevitable splintering of the psyche that occurs
during the Oedipal stage of childhood results in permanent internal fragmentation, thereby
rendering impossible any chance of complete internal harmony. As such, this notion of a unified
internal self becomes a mythical ideal—mythical because it neither can, nor ever will, truly exist in
spite of popular belief—capable of serving as a standard of integration for which one will
perpetually strive. Additionally, believing too fully in the ideal tends to result in such
psychological maladies as depression when one’s actual sense of self perpetually pales in
comparison to its ideal; the key to avoiding such a devastating pitfall, Lacan seems to indicate, is
neither to lose sight of, nor despair over, the ruptured origins of one’s sense of self, for such
inevitable fragmentation conditions one’s human experience, perhaps most especially when one’s
rearing takes place in the western world.

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course, the child encounters stiff competition in the form of the father
(mother’s “elsewhere,” as it were), to whom the mother has already given
herself, and it is on this point where Lacan slightly departs from Freud. For
Freud, the child recognizes something that the mother inherently lacks and, in
the case of a male child, that he possesses: the male generative organs. And
while the general consensus among scholars is that Freud’s related notions of
the phallus, Oedipal stage, and castration anxiety are thoroughly anatomical
in their most popular manifestations, Lacan understands the same ideas in a
way that places an even heavier emphasis on their figurative dimensions.13
For Lacan, the most influential factors of the Oedipal complex are
precisely those that are not physically present but, instead, symbolically
represented; indeed, Lacan enriches Freud’s notion of childhood development
by drawing attention to the social and symbolic factors of the emergent family
dynamic. One of the ways in which Lacan accomplishes this task is by
speaking almost exclusively of the phallus in lieu of the penis. Returning to
the quasi-‐‑undifferentiated mother-‐‑son dyad, the son longs ardently to be
regarded by his mother in the same way in which he regards her; it is as Lacan
writes: “What the child wants is to become the desire of desire, to be able to
satisfy the mother’s desire, that is, ‘to be or not to be’ the object of the mother’s
desire…[in order] to please the mother.”14 Lacan designates the supposed
object of the mother’s desire as the phallus; accordingly, Lacan identifies the
child as that which strives to become phallic. Due to the intimacy of their
relation at the child’s earliest stages of development, it is of little surprise that
the child assumes himself capable of, not merely possessing, but being all that
his mother lacks. Again, Lacan does not seek to establish the strong symbolic
connection between the phallus with the biological organ of the son (à la
Freud) but, rather, with that of the entirety of the young boy, and this includes
the child’s very desire to be desired by that which he desires, namely, the
mother, replete with her complete devotion to, and her full satisfaction with,
him. As we can see, what matters most for Lacan in this regard is what the
13 To be sure, Freud does not simply equate the phallus with the male genitalia (or female
genitalia, for that matter); rather, the penis represents the child’s sense of his own potency, or self-‐‑
efficacy; hence, it is a phallic symbol. As we see below, Lacan expounds upon its symbolic nature
in a way that is at once consistent with Freud’s understanding and uniquely his own. For one
example of a detailed articulation of the phallus in relation to the Oedipal stage, penis envy, and
castration anxiety, please see (among many other places) Freud, “On Narcissism,” 1–32.
14 Lacan, Seminar V: The Formation of the Unconscious, 98.

penis symbolizes: a supposition on the child’s part, or a possible solution to
the child’s fathoming of what his mother lacks—and, presumably, what she
must be searching for when not attending to him—and what he, in turn, might
be able to provide for her out of love, thereby bringing to fruition the child’s
fantasy of a perfectly symbiotic relationship. And while such a relationship
could never truly manifest in the way in which the child anticipates, it is the
unique way in which the child’s wishes are foiled that brings about the birth
of the unconscious.
As I previously mentioned, the mother has already given herself over
the father; but what does this mean, exactly? Relative to the son, it means that
the father’s mere presence threatens to thwart his aspirations insofar as he is
forced to bear witness to countless displays of affection between his parents;
subsequently, this Oedipal child cannot help but view his father as a rival. For
Lacan, the child’s experience of “castration anxiety,” of which Freud so often
speaks, is less a fear of dismemberment and more a fear of having one’s place
in his imagined, utopian mother-‐‑son fantasy usurped by a more imposing
force. The twofold realization that, firstly, the father is a more suitable phallic
figure for his mother and, secondly, that this is how his mother seems to
prefer it, is quite devastating; already, the boy’s “castration” has begun. The
father’s frustration of his son’s desires compels the son to modify his impulses
by directing them towards more attainable objects. Indeed, the father’s
intervention makes it clear that the mother, in a certain sense, belongs to him
and not to the child, and it is here, especially, where Lacan, in what is a truly
original development of Freud’s Oedipal theory, deepens the nature of the
family dynamic by extending such relations even further into the symbolic
realm. Specifically, he contends that the father’s intrusion is a necessary one
for the child’s socialization because the father represents the normative laws
of society writ large—the ultimate “father figure,” as it were.
As we will see in just a moment, metaphor plays a significant role in
deciphering the rebus that is one’s dream; it is, thus, only fitting that one finds
a particularly powerful metaphor at the heart of the affairs surrounding the
birth of the unconscious. According to Lacan, the father’s prohibition of the
son’s wish to be with his mother functions as a metaphor for society’s
disapproval of taboo desires (in this case, the desire for what appears to be an

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incestuous relationship).15 More to the point, the father serves as a delegate of
sorts for the norms of society, or those dictums that work to channel all desires
towards socially acceptable outlets.16
The child even begins to recognize this law of the father as operative
in the mother’s devotion to her paternal counterpart in the following sense:
based upon the tremendous amount of love and attention the mother bestows
upon the child, the child, at least initially, has a difficult time accepting the
idea that his mother does not also long for the same kind of Aristophanic
union as he.17 However, what the child concludes, Lacan contends, is that his
mother’s desires are already ordered by the father, and that the father, in this
sense, deliberately deprives each beloved of the other.
Nevertheless, the child interprets his mother’s loving behavior
towards his father as indicative of the kind of authoritative respect that is
becoming of a patriarch, and this encourages the son to comply with what he
perceives to be his father’s demands: that he abandon his infantile fantasy of a
society of two and, in doing so, seek satisfaction elsewhere (as his mother,
evidently, has already done). According to Lacan, this moment places the
child at a crucial impasse for the following reason: if the child submits to his
father and allows his desires to be tamed, then he is, in essence, capitulating to
the pre-‐‑established norms of his society, of which his father stands as an
embodiment.18 In such a scenario, the father’s figurative castration of his son’s
phallus effects a resolution of the Oedipal complex in the form of a baptism
15 Lacan notoriously dubs such laws (nomoi) the name (nom) of the father, thereby playing on a
felicitous homonymy in the French between nom (name) and non (the “no!” to incestuous union).
Clever, significant wordplay such as this pervades Lacan’s corpus.
16 The potential upshot is that, if the boy follows the example set by his mother and allows his
primordial desires to pass through the sieve of society via the Law of the Father, then he exits the
Oedipal stage with what Lacan refers to as “title deeds in its pocket”; in other words, Lacan
intimates that the child will mature into a conventionalized citizen who, if properly obedient to
society’s norms, may end up with a beloved after all. Whether or not such a socially appropriate
mate could ever be a satisfactory substitute for his first lost love, the mother, is questionable for
Lacan; at the very least, it casts an interesting light on the similarities between one’s chosen
spouse and one’s mother.
17 See the mythical speech delivered by the comedic playwright, Aristophanes, in Plato’s
Symposium (any translation will suffice).

18 The child’s ensuing oscillation between whether to remain phallic or not to remain phallic (to
accede to castration) is reflected in the Hamlet reference found in an earlier quotation. See above.

into the normative values of their community, thereby providing his son with
an orientation into conventional, civilized life.19
Ultimately, the son ceases to identify with his original desires and,
instead, commences to identify with the desires of society, thereby divorcing
himself from his initial urges and their corresponding object of affection. But
make no mistake: although figurative rather than literal, such castration
delivers traumatizing pain and confusion upon the child, who is all but
compelled to relinquish the first real love of his young life. Realizing that his
earliest feelings of desire are not simply misplaced but outright wrong to the
point of shameful, his subsequent supplication to the governing norms of
society levies a heavy tax on his still-‐‑developing, malleable, and highly fragile
sense of self-‐‑identity. Verily, the price he must pay to become normal is the
endurance of a traumatic detachment from his natural, previously unremitting
desire to be as close as possible with his nurturer. Such internal torment
triggers an immediate fragmentation of the psyche, or an opening of internal
space wherein what is entirely too painful of a loss and despicable of a desire
gets disowned and forgotten.20 And while this defense mechanism, repression,
allows the child to complete his maturation into that of a socially acceptable
individual, those initial desires—along with whatever other, similarly taboo
inclinations that become buried as quickly as they crop up—continue to fester
far below the purview of conscious awareness, only to surreptitiously
percolate back to the surface in unexpected and, oftentimes, uncontrollable
ways, as if demanding their acknowledgment.

P ART I, S ECTION II
A S EMIOTICS OF S YMPTOMS : L ACAN ’S L INGUISTIC R EFORMULATION OF
P SYCHOANALYSIS

19 It is worth noting that I have chosen to forego consideration of a major influence in Lacan’s
understanding of the Oedipus complex, namely, the Hegelian theme of the master-‐‑slave
relationship, wherein desire figures most prominently. While certainly an important point of
discussion in its own right, such considerations would be merely ancillary to the article’s primary
concern of dream interpretation.
20 “Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been
forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us seek to close our eyes to the
scenes of our childhood” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 297).

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As we have just seen, Lacan understands the birth of the unconscious to be the
inevitable result of a cataclysmic event that occurs in the early stages of
childhood development, when the child begrudgingly consents to allow his
once immediate desires to become mediated by the wishes of his
father/society. But, like all unresolved trauma, the effects of phallic castration
puncture through the illusory walls of self-‐‑awareness to reveal a part of
oneself that is, at once, both intimate and alien. And, whereas his biggest
influence, Freud, discusses the manifestation of repressed content in jokes,
parapraxes (“Freudian slips”), reveries (daydreams), and dreams, Lacan
focuses most predominantly on the latter. To that end, it behooves us to take a
close look at the specific way in which Lacan furthers the Freudian endeavor,
namely, through an ingenious reimagining of Freud’s initial diagnosis of
dream work in light of rhetorical tropes, a kinship encouraged by Freud but
never fully developed.
Perhaps the most fundamental connection between language and
dreams—the face of the unconscious, so to speak—is the figurative dimension
found in each form of expression. Beginning with dreams, Lacan takes up
Freud’s distinction of the two kinds of content inherent in them: manifest
content and latent content. The manifest content is the dream as it presents
itself, which is to say, the dream as we recall it. In other words, Lacan is
referring to the specific images, sounds, and plot that comprise the dream in
its literal presentation when discussing manifest content. Beneath the manifest
content, however, resides the latent content of the dream; it is what one’s
dream is truly indicating, or the real message that the unconscious is
attempting to communicate.
Lacan, following Freud, is convinced that the manifest content is
nothing but the latent content in disguise. This singular premise, that one
belies the other, suggests a fundamental connection between what appears in
the dream and what the dream is truly saying; taken in tandem, these two
dimensions comprise the entirety of the dream. Granting such a connection,
one can conclude, as Freud, Lacan, and countless other psychologists have,
that it is possible to excavate the latent content by way of delving into the
manifest content. Of course, this gives rise to two separate but related
questions: first, by what means does one gain access to what is merely
represented through what actually appears, or manifests? And, secondly,

what is the cause of, and subsequent need for, such a division within dreams?
In fact, we have already attended to that latter question in section I.
One does well to recall that the genesis of the unconscious is the result
of one’s primitive and unabashed desires being brought into check violently
by society’s pre-‐‑established norms; once an impressionable child becomes
indoctrinated into the conventions of his society, society can be said to have
left an indelible imprint on that person such that it becomes impossible to
return to one’s pre-‐‑normalized, arguably untainted perspective. Essentially,
each person is customizable—that is, able to be molded by the inherited
customs of one’s tradition—for one completes his accession to the “law of the
father” precisely by internalizing his or her community’s normative standards
of value and conduct. The internalization of society’s prescribed values
compels an identification of oneself with said norms; societal norms, then,
become the standard by which one evaluates oneself in terms of morality
(“Am I a good or a bad person?”) and self-‐‑efficacy (“Am I winning or losing in
this game of life?”). Accordingly, those initial desires found in the Oedipal
stage (delineated above) contrast so very starkly with one’s new
understanding of oneself that one cannot bear to acknowledge any previous
identification with one’s former set of desires for even a fleeting moment, lest
one run the risk of one’s self-‐‑identity being torn asunder; after all, each of us
has already been forced to endure such trauma once before.21 Such a strong,
deeply rooted aversion to this “other,” which is, nonetheless, part and parcel
with oneself, impacts the very form of manifestation that this otherness takes,
and this is especially apparent in its most sophisticated form of manifestation:
that of the dream form. To wit, the unconscious takes the form of a dream, as
it were, and crops up at a time when one’s defenses are down, and, yet, what
it has to reveal is so difficult to reconcile with what one thinks one knows
about oneself (or who one thinks one is) that the dream itself experiences
censorship. Accordingly, those pieces of the dream that one recalls—again, the
manifest content—have already been “cleared” for consciousness’ attention
only because they have since become far removed from what they represent
(again, the latent content) and, as a result, their consideration by the dreamer
21 Repression can thus be understood not only to shield oneself from the pain of past trauma, but
also to prevent the threat of future pain by working to ensure that one’s demons remain locked in
their hidden compartment, down deep in the corner of the basement, so to speak.

86 RAMIFY 5.1 (2015)

will not undermine the illusion of self-‐‑cohesiveness. The latent content, then,
is the truth of the dream, or that, which is, at once, the most insistent for its
reception and the most cloaked in secrecy.
Of course, remaining blissfully ignorant of a serious issue is no way of
resolving it. What is called for is a gradual unveiling and acceptance of what is
being repressed—indeed, a self-‐‑revelation of sorts—the purpose of which is to
work towards a more complete and honest form of self-‐‑integration. Lacan,
crediting Freud, understands this search for internal integrity to be the true
mission of psychoanalysis, even if, ultimately, the best that one can hope for is
a healthy acceptance of one’s irreparably fractured self.22 So understood, a
significant part of psychoanalysis must include the decoding of one’s manifest
content in order to “hear” the unconscious dream more clearly. To that end,
Freud determined that unconscious dreams are characterized by what he calls
displacement and condensation, terms that, taken literally, have a home in the
natural sciences as technical terms employed to explain the dynamics of force,
or energy.23
Relative to dream interpretation, Lacan’s overall approach is, in a
certain respect, a reiteration of this discovery of Freud, with the addition of
meticulous consideration given to the place and function of rhetorical tropes,
particularly metaphor and metonymy. In what remains of Part I, I present the
precise way in which Lacan links Freud’s notion of condensation with
metaphor and links displacement with metonymy, respectively. In doing so, I
hope to make sense of Lacan’s contention that the unconscious is structured
like a language.
Freud distinguishes between several forms of condensation in The
Interpretation of Dreams. One such paradigm is condensation by fusion, or
“superimposition.” According to this type, various elements of latent material
become fused together, or condensed, into a single entity on the level of the
manifest content. Similar to the way in which a neologism tends to arise from
the combination of two or more terms, certain individual characters or items
within one’s dreams can be the result of a fusion of several different
22 Recall that the very nature of socialization removes any possibility of a complete return to the
time of one’s free-‐‑forming desires; accordingly, a complete merging of one’s socially-‐‑constructed
self with one’s other, unconscious side is forever out of reach.
23 “Dream-‐‑displacement and dream-‐‑condensation are the two governing factors to whose activity
we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 343).

individuals from one’s waking life. Such a person represents a composite of
potentially several individuals, against whom one might secretly harbor such
strong feelings that one is unwilling to admit them to oneself.24 For example,
one may happen to harbor severe resentment towards one’s previously
abusive grandfather, who has since begun suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,
one’s buffoon of a brother, who now suffers from cancer, and one’s son, who
was born without well-‐‑functioning kidneys and requires numerous and
expensive surgeries. Such feelings are instantly repressed; however, one may
have a dream in which one confronts one’s childhood bully, only this version
of the bully also happens to have the dreamer’s brother’s nose, grandfather’s
gait, and a non-‐‑rhotic accent similar to the dreamer’s son. Thus, the latent
content is sufficiently disguised to where it remains unnoticed by the dreamer,
hypothetically speaking.
The second kind of condensation involves an omission rather than a
pastiche of sorts. With condensation qua omission, the reconstruction of the
latent content as presented in the manifest content is omitted, substituted, or
incomplete to the point of virtually imperceptible. Whereas the
aforementioned composite figure unifies several particular targets of the same
latent, or repressed impulse (resentment), omission occurs as an over-‐‑
determination of a single element within the manifest content, one that is the
nodal point, to use Lacan’s terminology, for a multiplicity of latent elements.25
To put this important point alternatively, a single entity could signify several
different unconscious feelings and desires, such that it becomes quite difficult
for both the analyst and analysand to trace back the various chains of
associations that have since merged into a single entity. For instance, one may
have a dream in which one looses an incisor. This single displaced tooth may
be the symbolic nexus for several conflicting impulses, such as the seething
anger one harbors over the affair that an ex-‐‑wife had with a dentist, the grief
one may still feel over the loss of a parent who had played the role of the tooth
fairy, and even the lament one feels towards one’s own son’s inevitable
24 One of Freud’s most famous examples of condensation qua superimposition is the “propyls” of
“The Dream of Irma’s Injection” (Ibid., 328–330).
25 One of Freud’s most famous examples of condensation qua omission is the botanical
monograph of “The Dream of the Botanical Monograph.” Ibid., 316–319.

88 RAMIFY 5.1 (2015)

progression towards adolescence and beyond. In such a case, the lost tooth
symbolizes not one, but all three of these repressed impulses simultaneously.
The other primary mechanism identified by Freud is displacement.
Like condensation, displacement works to obscure on the manifest level that
which is fundamental on the latent. But unlike condensation, displacement
involves a transfer of desire from the actual object to one that is less
threatening or disruptive, which is to say, one that is easily integrated into
who the person is or aspires to be during her waking life. In this sense,
displacement either obscures by emphasizing on the manifest level that which
is relatively insignificant on the latent level or, inversely, deemphasizing on
the manifest level that which is most significant on the latent level.26 For
instance, the central person, object, or event around which one’s dream
appears to revolve may be a representation of something nugatory, whereas a
seemingly incidental detail of one’s dream can represent a surplus of meaning
and, indeed, is presented in so unnoticeable a fashion for that very reason.
Now that we have attended to the quintessentially Freudian aspects of
Lacan’s method of dream analysis, we are prepared to consider the explicitly
linguistic component of Lacan’s approach. As we are about to see, Freud alone
did not influence Lacan; in fact, Lacan borrows from the Structuralist thinkers
of his day, and none are quite so rich and generous as Ferdinand de Saussure,
from whom Lacan adopts the notion of linguistic signs, and Roman Jakobson,
from whom Lacan appropriates the theory that metaphor and metonymy, or
selection and combination, are the two basic axes of language and
communication.27
Regarding Saussure’s contribution, Lacan understands the linguistic
sign to be that, which “unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a
26 “It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the dream-‐‑work a psychical force is operating which
on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychic value of their intensity, and on the
other hand, by means of over-‐‑determination, creates from elements of low psychical value new
values, which afterwards find their way into the dream-‐‑content. If that is so, a transference and
displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-‐‑formation…the process which we
are here presuming is nothing less than the essential portion of the dream-‐‑work; and it deserves to
be described as ‘dream-‐‑displacement’” (Ibid., 342–343).
27 Because Lacan makes these insights very much his own, a detailed excursion into the intricacies
of Saussure and Jakobson, respectively, would be beside the point of this essay.

sound-‐‑image.”28 What is important for Lacan is the nature of the sign itself,
namely, that it is an example of an associative relation between that which is
signified and that which is accomplishing the signifying, otherwise known as
the signifier. And whereas Saussure attributes primacy to that which is
signified, “the concept,” over and above that which is signifying, or the
auditory image, Lacan promptly inverts the schematic relation such that the
signifier retains top priority, and, moreover, he does so for reasons involving
the role of metaphor and metonymy in dreams.
The most important aspect of metaphor is that a metaphor is
figurative rather than literal, such that this stands in for that in an exclusive
sort of way; for this reason, metaphor operates on the paradigmatic axis of
language insofar as its modus operandi includes selection, substitution, and
similarity. Lacan does well here to draw a connection between the substitution
facet of metaphor and the way in which condensation is said to operate in
dreams; just as substitution, an inherent property of metaphor, occurs when
one substitutes a word or image for another one, the crux of condensation is
that a new image stands in for, or signifies, something other than itself.
Before advancing on to metonymy, it is necessary to mention that the
respective metamorphosing powers of metaphor and metonymy as they
operate simultaneously in dream formation are what co-‐‑constitute the locus of
the dream work, and to understand them as merely isolated, if coincidental,
acts rather than in tandem and as mutually reinforcing is to enucleate the
dream of its cohesiveness. Indeed, the significance of metaphor for Lacan’s
purposes is not to be understood apart from the role played by metonyms, for
it is the artful way in which they operate in conjunction with one another that
lends the dream its fundamentally holistic quality for Lacan.
Bearing this in mind, a metonym, then, is a term for that which is but
a part of a greater whole uttered in reference to that greater whole. For
example, when a young adult casually refers to his friend’s new car by saying,
“nice wheels,” he is employing a synecdoche, which is a species of metonymy.
Accordingly, metonymy is the representation of the whole by merely a part;
for Lacan, this is simply another way to understand the representation of the
By “sound-‐‑image,” Saussure is referring to the sensory impression that a sound leaves on one’s
28
senses, as opposed the purely material, auditory element. Please see Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics, 66.

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essential by the incidental, which, as we have seen already, is Freud’s notion
of displacement as operative in the realm of unconscious dreamscapes. Rather
than pivoting on the kind of substitution akin to metaphor, metonymy
functions on a syntagmatic axis of language and, as such, relies on
combination, contexture, and contiguity: this stands in proximal relation to
that in an inclusive fashion. In other words, deciphering the metonymic
elements within dreams requires a traversal of the associative chain of
contiguous elements, beginning, no doubt, with what comes last but is most
readily apparent: the manifest content.
To return to my previous example, one’s dream may include a pair of
wheels that occur in the dream for a matter of seconds. This set of tires, while
a seemingly meaningless detail in an otherwise epic dream, may be the piece
of the dream that is most in need of analysis. Following the chain of
association, these wheels may represent a particular car from one’s past, with
which one associates strong emotions or repressed memories that one needs to
acknowledge above all others; the wheels’ minor role in the dream belies their
significance, for the difficulty which the patient will have in coming to terms
with what they represent are commensurate with the degree to which they are
downplayed in the dream. In a sense, the dream is at odds with itself by
working to heal the patient while also “protecting” the patient from the
severity of the healing process. And, insofar as the dream is an extension of
the patient, the patient could be said to be at odds with herself without fully
realizing how or why; given the complicated nature of such a condition, the
crucial role of the midwife played by the psychoanalyst when engaging the
patient in psychoanalytic dream interpretation is evident.
By way of concluding Part I, I must reiterate that the linchpin which
ties together Lacan’s understanding of how nocturnal dreams suggest that the
unconscious is structured like a language is the primacy of the signifier in
relation to the signified. Recall that metaphor is a linguistic mechanism that
runs along language’s paradigmatic axis, which is to say, along the axis of the
lexicon; indeed, metaphor is nothing other than a process of lexical
enrichment insofar as it attributes figurative meaning. In essence, then,
metaphorizing consists of referring to something by the name of something
else, and the ease with which one is able to substitute one signifier for another
while avoiding misunderstandings is precisely what Lacan finds so important.
Thanks to metaphor, it becomes possible to identify terms predominately with

their figurative meaning; from here, one can further deepen the meaning of a
word by employing its already-‐‑figurative meaning in such a way that
substitutes a new figurative meaning in place of the old one, thereby pushing
it away from its original connotation, or that which was initially the signified.
Once such refiguring has taken place, what one is left with, according
to Lacan, is a signifier that is signifying, or substituting for, another signifier.
The signifier’s primacy over the signified lies in the fact that one is still able to
make sense of what has been spoken of or, as Lacan puts it, “follow the logic
of the signifiers.” Hence, one is able to deliver perfectly intelligible discourse
or participate in a conversation with recourse to only a network of signifiers,
whereas the same could not be done with pure signifieds, for they depend on
signifiers for their comprehensible reception in communication; thusly, it is
the signifiers that govern the signified and not the other way around (à la
Saussure).29 Lacan, in a stroke of genius, recognizes this phenomenon as
inherent in dreams, for it is entirely possible to have one word or image
substitute for another word or image that was already itself a metaphorical
substitution. And just as the similarity between the two signifying elements
that compose a metaphor is not always immediately apparent and, therefore,
the statement spoken to one by another appears unintelligible, so, too, can a
dream that includes the metaphoric work of condensation appear
unintelligible, unreadable, or just plain unusual. Accordingly, interpreting a
dream is akin to grasping a metaphor in reverse order, for “metaphor occurs
at the precise point at which sense emerges from non-‐‑sense,” which is to say,
when the dream suddenly means something.30 Furthermore, the same basic
principle holds true in the case of metonymy, with the exception being that
metonymy, once again, restricts itself to the syntagmatic axis. Essentially, it is
slightly easier to recognize the relation of signifiers in metonymy to the extent
that, even if the whole of the signifier does not get mentioned in discourse, or
does not fully materialize in the manifest content of one’s dream, the meaning
comes across regardless thanks to the contiguous relation of part to whole; in
other words, the signifying relation behind their linkage remains more explicit
29 For an exceptionally thorough and riveting example of this principle in action, please see
Lacan’s treatments of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, The Purloined Letter, in his eponymous Seminars.
30 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Ecrits, 2007, 172.

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and, therefore, more discernable. It is, thus, in light of such considerations that
Lacan writes

As a rule, we must always give precedence to the signified in our analyses,
because it’s certainly what is most seductive and what seems at first to be the
dimension appropriate to symbolic investigation in psychoanalysis. But in
misrecognizing the primary mediating role of the signifier, in misrecognizing
that it is the signifier that in reality is the guiding element, not only do we
throw the original understanding of neurotic phenomena, the interpretation
of dreams itself, out of balance, but we make ourselves absolutely incapable
of understanding what is happening in the psychoses…. The opposition
between metaphor and metonymy is fundamental, since what Freud
originally emphasized in the mechanisms of neurosis, as well as in those of
marginal phenomena of normal life or of dreams, is neither the metaphoric
dimension nor identification. It’s the opposite. In general, what Freud calls
condensation is what in rhetoric we call metaphor. What he calls
displacement is metonymy. The structuration, the lexical existence of the
entirety of the signifying apparatus, determines the phenomena present in
neurosis, because the signifier expresses itself. This is why, when we turn our
attention back to the signifier, we’re doing nothing other than returning to the
starting point of the Freudian discovery.31

In these elements of Lacan’s thought, we find all of the principle theoretical
arguments justifying the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a
language. The primacy of the signifier is attested to by the metaphoric and
metonymic mechanisms; these mechanisms are assimilated to the functioning
of the primary process, condensation and displacement; and, finally, they are
extended to the configuration of the formations of the unconscious.32
For Lacan, each dream is a discourse of desire being uttered by an
Other that comes from within and, yet, will forever remain at some distance.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to conclude, as Lacan does, that dreams are,
ultimately, symptoms of an insatiable desire for recognition on the part of that
piece of us which was abandoned outside of the gates of societal norms. When
the unconscious is brought to light by dismantling the dream through
following its chain of associations, the symptoms are only alleviated in the
31 Lacan, Seminar III, 220–221.

32 Dor, The Unconscious Structured like a Language, 45.

sense that one’s dreams appear less foreign and arbitrary; instead, one begins
to catch a glimpse of a lost and long-‐‑forgotten chapter in one’s personal
history and, in doing so, comes to appreciate the purpose and presentation
behind one’s dreams.

P ART II: U NCONSCIOUS A RT : J UNG ’S R ECASTING OF P SYCHOANALYSIS AS
AN A PPRECIATION OF THE P SYCHE ’ S C APACITY TO C REATE S PONTANEOUSLY

If Lacan’s development of his notion of the unconscious is, in part, an attempt
to rein in psychology from its departure from Freud, then Jung’s theory of the
unconscious could easily be likened to a maverick, whose bucking spooked
the rest of the yoked harem into wild dispersion. To put this differently, Jung,
from Lacan’s perspective, is an example of what happens when psychology
drifts too far afield from its Freudian roots. And, while many scholars of
psychology and beyond have discussed the tempestuous relationship between
Freud and Jung,33 it is worth mentioning here that Jung’s biggest influence in
psychology was never Freud but, rather, Theodore Flournoy, whose case
studies on individuals claiming to possess clairvoyance and memories of past
lives are what encouraged Jung’s keen interest in, and subsequent analysis of,
such phenomena.34
On a related note, although I discussed Lacan’s account of the origin
of the unconscious in great detail, less attention will be paid to Jung’s genesis
theory. The reason for this omission is simply that a nuanced understanding
of the set of circumstances that cause the psyche to become fissured is
necessary if one is to entertain seriously Lacan’s account of the intricacies of
dreams and their corresponding method of analysis. By comparison, Jung’s
inquiries typically lead him to bypass the developmental phases of early
childhood in lieu of exploring the more artistic dimensions of the psyche.
Rather than tracing the unconscious back to its hypothetical point of departure
33 “The correspondence between Freud and Jung is hard to outclass in terms of the incidence of
invective and vitriol that they dished out to their psychological and psychiatric colleagues, and
finally, to each other” (Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology,50). For a more
recent and cinematic portrayal of their infamous falling-‐‑out, see A Dangerous Method, directed by
David Cronenberg and starring Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen, 2011.
34 See, for instance, Flournoy'ʹs From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with
Imaginary Languages.

94 RAMIFY 5.1 (2015)

in childhood trauma, Jung prefers to focus his investigations on the latter half
of one’s life, for this is arguably when one’s creative capacities begin to bear
their ripest fruit. As scholar Hester Solomon surmises, Like popes of old in the
face of the globe as it was then, Freud and Jung had

divided up the map of the human psyche, with Freud and his followers
concentrating on its depths, on the exploration of the early childhood
developmental stages, while Jung and his followers focused on its heights, on
the functioning of the more mature states of mind, including those creative
and artistic states responsible for the finest cultural, spiritual, and scientific
pursuits of mankind, states which Jung studied as aspects and activities of the
self.35

Essentially, Jung suspects that the psyche’s true power lies in its ability to
create rather than conceal; the nature of such creation and the means through
which the unconscious gives rise to creativity in dream form are the focus of
this section.
In order to attain a solid understanding of the creative element that
grounds Jung’s approach to interpreting the unconscious, one need only to
look at what he has identified as the productive forces at work in dreams: that
is, the interlocking notions of the archetypes and the collective unconscious,
respectively. To that end, it serves us well to examine two salient excerpts
from his collected works, both of which stem from the same volume. In this
first passage, Jung offers a response to those contemporaries of his whose
criticism of his work resides on a fundamental misunderstanding:

Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is
determined in regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind of
unconscious idea (if such an expression be admissible). It is necessary to point
out once more that the archetypes are not determined as regards their
content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree.
A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become
conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious
experience. Its form, however, as I have explained elsewhere, might perhaps
be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, pre-‐‑forms the
crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material
35 Hester McFarland Solomon, “The developmental school,” 120.


existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which
the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely
formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation
which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only
the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts,
which are also determined in form only. The existence of the instincts can no
more be proved than the existence of the archetypes, so long as they do not
manifest themselves concretely.36

Perhaps nowhere else does Jung provide a more definitive explication of the
nature of archetypes. Aside from serving as a corrective for those countless
commentators of his work who mistakenly interpret his understanding of
archetypes as consistent in content as well as form, this passage gives the
reader a firm understanding of how Jung views the creative capacities of the
psyche. Essentially, one’s psyche is pre-‐‑disposed to create, recognize, and
identify with the particular manifestation of universal, possibly eternal forms.
What is more, these empty forms are, themselves, formative insofar as they
give shape to the material of conscious experience. When form directs content
in this fashion, the results are what Jung refers to elsewhere as “natural
symbols…derived from the unconscious contents of the psyche, and they
therefore represent an enormous number of variations on the essential
archetypal images.”37 Indeed, that to which Jung is referring by “the material
of conscious experience” is the emergence of archetypal images within the
context of a given cultural milieu. The inevitable appearance of such images
testifies to the symbol-‐‑making propensities of man insofar as man’s psyche is,
for Jung, predisposed to the creation of key symbolic images by virtue of the
spontaneous and creative qualities of the archetypes, those formative
principles to which all human beings have access.
Furthermore, such images are not necessarily purely visual; quite the
contrary, Jung interprets the concretization of certain archetypal motifs in the
rich and varied myths of one’s culture, most especially those grand narratives
that seek to account for the creation of the cosmos, its possible destruction,
and the like. To be sure, Jung is not equating archetype with symbol here.
36 Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, pt. 1, 79–80.
37 Carl Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” 83.

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Instead, the archetypes afford the psyche its ability to work within the
symbolic order of one’s culture so that such myths are not only produced, but
also preserved. Indeed, the particular examples of symbolism within one’s
cultural heritage correspond to those “representations that are not inherited,”
for these are created by man.38 It is, then, no coincidence that the archetypal
figures such as the mother, god, the hero, the shadow—one’s dark side, as it
were—occur in virtually every culture’s origin story; they are central to all
myth because they are fundamental to man himself.
At this point, one cannot help but pose the question as to the nature of
myth to which Jung appears to be subscribing; in what way in particular did
these empty, purely formal archetypes become of a piece with unconscious
instincts, their biological correspondents? Jung, in an especially lucid passage,
offers the following clarification regarding his understanding of the
unconscious:

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I
call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a
deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a
personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective
unconscious. I have chosen the term "ʺcollective"ʺ because this part of the
unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal
psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same
everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men
and thus constitutes a common psychic substratum of a suprapersonal nature
which is present in every one of us. Psychic existence can be recognized only
by the presence of contents capable of consciousness. We can therefore speak
of an unconscious only in so far as we are able to demonstrate its contents.
The contents of the personal unconscious are chiefly feeling-‐‑toned complexes,
as they are called; they constitute the personal and private side of psychic life.
38 This distinction is important, for Jung is “far from applying a European symbolism to peoples of
other cultures; this is a fundamental misunderstanding. What he is saying is that certain
similarities in the symbols and myths of all peoples can be discerned, so far as they contain
images of the archetypes of the collective unconscious in them. Jung makes a further distinction
between symbols and signs. While some aspect of a symbol remains undefinable, a sign simply
denotes a particular object or thing, and thus may stand for it. The Christian cross is an example of
both a sign and a symbol. As a sign, it stands for a given religion. As a symbol, it represents part
of the mythological background of that religion and is ultimately undefinable” (Drake, “Jung and
His Critics,” 332).

The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as
archetypes.39

Here, Jung takes measures to distinguish between the “personal unconscious,”
that is, the unconscious as experienced uniquely by each individual, and the
“collective unconscious,” which both supports and gives rise to the personal
unconscious. We have arrived, then, at the level of dreams; Jung recognizes
the presence of archetypal figures within dreams, and their presence within
one’s personal dreamscapes indicates an intermingling between one’s
personal unconscious and that of the collective unconscious.
For Jung, such intermingling is more than mere happenstance, for the
recognition of archetypes within one’s dreams is the key to unraveling one’s
dreams. In fact, the place of archetypes in the collective unconscious indicates
that their manifestation in one’s private dreams is beneficial for the psychical
healing of the patient. Accordingly, the psychoanalytic “talking cure,” so to
speak, becomes a game of identifying patterns of symbols, which is to say, the
analyst strives to ascertain what those entities contained within the
analysand’s private dreams symbolize for her individually and her culture in
general, at which point one can begin to correctly identify the manifestation of
certain archetypes within one’s dreams. Broadly speaking, Jung’s approach to
the nature of dreams is best understood as based upon a teleological
understanding of the psyche, whereby all psychological events, including the
most severe symptoms, are considered to have purpose and meaning.40

F INAL T HOUGHTS

Both Lacan and Jung agree that the personal psychical experience of one’s
dreams, despite its apparent particularity and incommunicability, contains
structural invariants, without which it could be neither identified nor named
as such; for Lacan, these structures are linguistic, and, for Jung, these
structures are archetypal/mythic-‐‑poetic, and, as evidenced above, are also
indelibly intertwined with linguistic expression.
39 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, pt. 1, 3–4.
40 Solomon, “The developmental school,” 121.

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For Lacan, the unconscious has no location and is no-‐‑thing, that is, it is
a reaction to a lack or severance that remains forever unsatisfied, and the only
evidence psychologists have for its existence is its linguistic-‐‑like
materialization in the form of its “tells,” namely, parapraxis and dreams, both
daydreams and nocturnal manifestations. For this reason, these indicators,
taken collectively, are the unconscious, and, considering their linguistic mode
of representation, which itself all but demands reception, consideration, and
interpretation as and through language via the “talking cure,” Lacan’s
abstruse claim that the unconscious is structured like a language is
understandable and, in fact, well-‐‑stated. It thus follows that, when he defines
the unconscious as speech, which is suggested by the technique of the talking
cure, he treats the symptom as a kind of message, an encoded cipher for a
gagged discourse containing a kernel of truth.41 And, similarly, when the
unconscious is described not just as speech but as a language, the symptom
becomes known as a signifier structured like a metaphorical chain concealing
the primary signifier of the trauma.42
For Jung, however, the unconscious is, rather than nothing, some-‐‑
thing (and a collection of things, at that). While he agrees with Lacan that the
unconscious always and only expresses itself through symbolic means (never
literally), thereby requiring an interpretative approach, he contends that the
unconscious is that which is found deep inside a person and composed of
archetypes and their corresponding universal manifestations, arguably best
embodied through divine myths, or religion, that have been passed on
(perhaps even phylogenetically) since the dawn of mankind and of which
dreams are imitative. Jung’s notion of the unconscious contends that the
unconscious has a secure location in the psyche and is of a positive nature,
that it is substantial and, rather than signaling a deprivation of cohesiveness,
is a plenum of sorts. It may come as no surprise, then, that Jung focuses on the
creative, productive, even prophetic nature of myths partially as a reaction to
Freud’s narrow, regressive, and reductionist reliance on prepubescent
childhood development. Jung’s passion for the possible, as it were, is further
characterized by a speculative openness to alternative approaches (hypnotism,
occult, séance or other agency involving a medium, to name but a few). But,
contrary to Jung’s critical appraisal of Freudian psychoanalysis as, at root,
41 Soler, “The paradoxes of the symptom in psychoanalysis,” 86.

42 Ibid., 86.

entirely reductive to the realm of the biological and psychosocial, Lacan, while
agreeing that the emergence of the unconscious directly centers around
Freud’s notions of the phallus, Oedipal complex, castration, and other such
terms borrowed from prepubescent sexual development, does not hold that
such reduction is necessarily limiting. Indeed, Lacan’s mining of the insight
that the unconscious is structured like a language is such a strong exhibition of
the productive, poetic nature of the unconscious that one could make the
argument that it is Jungian in spirit in spite of its being his most strident claim
to remain faithful to that which he understands to be authentically Freudian.
Such a claim even finds support in Lacan scholar Darian Leader, who writes,
“If we understand myths less as fictions with a low truth-‐‑value than as
attempts to make sense of contingent and perhaps traumatic sets of events by
means of a narrative, then all developmental schemas have a mythic
character.”43
While we may safely conclude that Lacan and Jung’s respective
theories of dream interpretation are compatible to a significant degree, is it
possible that they are also, in fact, complementary? Perhaps so, for our
investigative comparison has introduced the strong possibility that the
crystalline structure of Jung’s archetypes directly corresponds to Lacan’s way
of taking up Saussure’s notion of the structure of language. Furthermore, on
an even more fundamental level, both thinkers agree that the unconscious
beckons for attentive consideration through dreams and, thus, cries out for its
decipherment for the sake of bettering the individual. Herein lies Lacan’ and
Jung’s most significant similarity: both agree that psychoanalysis is meant for
more than just the reparative suture of some sort of brokenness within the
patient; specifically, it is for the sake of true betterment, or psychological
refinement of an individual, and this is why those who are not afflicted with
any form of neurosis or psychosis whatsoever (i.e. “normal”) can still benefit
from its self-‐‑revelatory effects. Ultimately, for both authors, psychoanalysis is
something of a hermeneutic art resting on a maieutic method that, when
successful, affords the patient a personalized propedeutics of selfhood for the
sake of enhancing her overall quality of life. And, the conditions that allow for
the efficacy of dream analysis (those curative, enriching effects that it fosters)
43 Leader, “Lacan’s Myths,” 36.

100 RAMIFY 5.1 (2015)

are the constitutive elements of the unconscious itself, those cryptic yet
inviting signals that are structured like a language and plead for their
interpretation. If nothing else, this suggests that even our most primal urges
are linguistically inclined; in this crucial sense, we are, quite possibly,
fundamentally linguistic down to our deepest of depths.44

The author kindly thanks Timothy Burns, Scott D. Churchill, Robert Kugelmann, Kristina
44
Manzi, Takeshi Morisato, and Dennis Sepper for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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Every Dream Is A Discourse: Lacan, Jung, and The Linguistic Nature of Unconscious Dreamscapes

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Every Dream Is a Discourse : M ANZI 73

Every Dream Is a

Symposium (any translation will suffice).

31 Lacan, Seminar III, 220–221.

35 Hester McFarland Solomon, “The developmental school,” 120.

41 Soler, “The paradoxes of the symptom in psychoanalysis,” 86.

43 Leader, “Lacan’s Myths,” 36.

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